MCKILLEN ON CARROLL, 'AMERICA AND THE MAKING OF AN INDEPENDENT IRELAND' - H-NET

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H-Diplo

McKillen on Carroll, 'America and the Making of an
Independent Ireland'
Review published on Saturday, August 21, 2021

Francis M. Carroll. America and the Making of an Independent Ireland. New York: New York
University Press, 2021. 312 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4798-0565-5.

Reviewed by Elizabeth McKillen (The University of Maine) Published on H-Diplo (August, 2021)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56518

Despite an extensive range of scholarly case studies on US responses to the Irish Revolution
(1916-23) dating back to the 1950s, US diplomatic historians have largely failed to come to terms
with its significance in shaping US foreign policy during the World War I era. Although President
Woodrow Wilson made self-determination for oppressed nationalities a goal of US wartime foreign
policy, his responses to the Irish Revolution have long been overshadowed in foreign policy textbooks
and synthetic scholarship on Wilson by extended accounts of his policies toward the more radical
Mexican and Russian Revolutions. More recently, historians have focused on the ways in which
Wilsonian rhetoric helped fuel nationalist sentiments and movements in Asia and the Middle East.[1]
In his new book, however, Francis Carroll asserts that, due to the large and politically influential Irish
American community in the United States, Irish issues remained an important focus not only of the
Wilson administration, but also of the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations. He
argues that “at every stage, from the home rule movement through the 1916 Rising to the world of
international diplomacy in the 1920s, the United States performed a crucial role in, and was a major
contributing force to, the achievement of Irish sovereignty” (p. xii).

The author of multiple, well-received books on Irish America and the struggle for Irish independence,
Carroll argues that a reappraisal of US diplomacy toward the Irish struggle is needed in part because
of the opening of new government archives in the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. New
historiography on the Irish Revolution itself, as well as the centennial of the Irish Revolution, has also
inspired renewed scholarly interest in the American contribution to the Irish nationalist crusade.
Carroll begins by highlighting the size and political influence of the Irish American community on the
eve of World War I. By 1910, approximately 4,504,360 Americans had been born in Ireland or had at
least one parent who had been born in Ireland. Another twenty million were third- or fourth-
generation Irish Americans. Carroll estimates that those with some Irish heritage constituted about
21 percent of the total American population (p. 2). From an early date, Irish Americans developed an
extensive set of fraternal and nationalist organizations that, in turn, played an important role in
political lobbying and in cultivating close ties with the Democratic Party. The United Irish League
won support in the United States for the Irish Home Rule movement, while the Clan na Gael emerged
as a secret society pledged to revolutionary tactics to achieve a fully independent Irish republic. The
latter group helped to win popular support for Irish independence by supporting the activities of Irish
groups promoting a revival of Gaelic culture in the early twentieth century, such as the Gaelic League
and Gaelic Athletic Association, and by sponsoring tours of representatives of these groups in the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. McKillen on Carroll, 'America and the Making of an Independent Ireland'. H-Diplo. 12-01-2021.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/8114144/mckillen-carroll-america-and-making-independent-ireland
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

H-Diplo

United States. The Clan also played a key role in planning and financing the Irish Easter Rebellion of
1916 and in creating a new group, the Friends of Irish Freedom, to educate and encourage American
support for the Irish rebels.

Although the Easter Rising was an “incredible organizational accomplishment” (p. 11) for the Clan na
Gael and Irish Republican Brotherhood, in a military sense it proved a dismal failure and initially won
little popular support either in Ireland or the United States. The execution of the leaders of the Easter
Rising, however, provoked outrage and spurred widespread anti-British sentiment in the United
States at a time when the Wilson administration was becoming increasingly pro-British due to
German submarine attacks. Carroll demonstrates convincingly that both British and American
governmental leaders were very worried about the role that the Irish American community could play
in undermining any future US war effort. Spurred by this concern, Wilson worked through the US
diplomatic service only shortly after declaring war to encourage the British to find a “satisfactory
method of self-government for Ireland” (p. 24). The British, perhaps influenced by the Wilson
administration, subsequently staged a conference with the major Irish parties to discuss future home
rule solutions, but it proved unsuccessful. By contrast, the Wilson administration enjoyed some
partial successes in moderating the treatment of Irish political prisoners and in paving the way for
American relief efforts in Ireland. Both US and British leaders worried that the imposition of
conscription in Ireland would provoke a backlash in Irish America, but the British proceeded with
these plans anyway, spurring new antiwar activism.

The failure of the Irish Convention staged by the British to resolve the problem of self-government, in
combination with the imposition of conscription in Ireland, fueled the growth of the Sinn Féin
independence movement in Ireland, which sought a hearing for the case of Irish self-determination at
the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Irish Americans, in turn, created an American Commission on
Irish Independence to travel to Paris to convince Wilson of the need to secure a hearing for Ireland at
the peace conference. Wilson met with Irish American representatives and insisted that he worked
privately with British leaders to encourage them to settle the Irish question. Yet he failed to press the
issue of an Irish hearing before the peace conference, thereby alienating significant components of
Irish America and leading them to work with Republicans in defeating the treaty and League of
Nations. A full-scale guerrilla war, meanwhile, developed between British forces and Irish rebels.
Over the course of the next two years, Irish American groups launched highly successful bond
certificate and other aid campaigns to help fund the newly created Irish government, Dáil Éireann.
Carroll extensively details the creative ways in which Irish Americans overcame legal and strategic
obstacles to achieve these financial successes. Carroll also underscores the importance of the
American Commission on Conditions in Ireland in 1920-21 in bringing public attention to British
atrocities during the war and, in turn, leading British prime minister Lloyd George to seek a truce.
Carroll next explores the ways in which the treaty, which partitioned Ireland and established a
Dominion status for Southern Ireland, bitterly divided the Irish both in Ireland and Irish America. The
final chapters examine the role of the Harding and Coolidge administrations in diplomatically
recognizing representatives from Ireland, the first British Dominion given this formal status, and an
important step in achieving national independence in foreign affairs.

Published one hundred years after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Carroll’s book is an important
contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of the Irish-American relationship. He succeeds in
demonstrating that the Irish American lobby was a significant source of concern for British leaders;

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the Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge administrations; and Congress. He also demonstrates that the
Irish American lobby, in concert with visiting Irish leaders, helped to shape US public opinion on
important foreign policy issues during this period and likely played an important role in turning some
Americans against the Versailles Peace Treaty and League of Nations. Less convincing is his
argument that the United States significantly influenced British actions on Irish issues for, as he
admits, many factors likely came into play in its ongoing decisions about whether to seek peace or
continue to war against Irish rebels.

One other weakness of Carroll’s analysis is that he fails to adequately explore recent literature on the
role of women and labor activists in the transnational activities of the Irish nationalist movement
during these years. This literature is not just ancillary; it could force a reanalysis of key issues.
Although Carroll mentions the activities of a few key women lecturers such as Mary and Muriel
MacSwiney, the scope and significance of women’s activism was much broader. A steady stream of
Irish widows and female relatives of Easter Rising martyrs came to America and proved to be highly
popular speakers. These women not only told shocking stories about British atrocities but also
accused Wilson of hypocrisy for ignoring issues of Irish democracy while ostensibly fighting a war to
make the world safe for democracy. Irish women on lecture tours also played a key role in
encouraging Irish American women to develop a vast national infrastructure of women’s
organizations that launched some of the most militant Irish nationalist campaigns of the era,
including aggressive picketing campaigns modeled on those of the suffrage movement. Both the
British and American Secret Services viewed Irish women lecturers and their American allies as so
dangerous that they instituted extensive surveillance of their activities and, on some occasions,
successfully encouraged local police to arrest them.[2]

Many of the fraternal and nationalist groups Carroll discusses, meanwhile, actively tried to solicit the
support of Irish American workers and labor activists. Such overtures were not surprising because, as
recent studies have shown, Irish Americans dominated leadership positions at almost every level of
the American Federation of Labor during this era and enjoyed a strong presence in the Industrial
Workers of the World. The American Commission on Irish Independence, for example, created a
separate Labor Bureau to win trade union support for a boycott of British goods. John Fitzpatrick,
head of the powerful Chicago Federation of Labor, organized a nationwide trade union boycott with
assistance from the Irish American newspaper the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator and
Irish American women’s groups despite strong opposition from American Federation of Labor leader
Samuel Gompers. Irish American labor leaders also worked with women’s groups in promoting a
walkout by New York dockworkers who refused to unload British goods from ships in protest against
British actions in Ireland. The walkout soon blossomed into a dockworkers’ strike that spread up and
down the Eastern seaboard. Activities like these drew strong criticism and protest from British
authorities. In an era of widespread global labor unrest and radicalism, British leaders might
arguably have feared militant mass actions by Irish Americans that injured British economic
interests, and won support from American, Irish, and British labor, more than mild rebukes by the
Wilson administration.[3]

Newer literature on women and labor could also help Carroll better develop his discussion on how
and why the Irish Civil War divided Irish America. Carroll portrays anti-treaty activists as “dogmatic”
and as engaging in a “slanderous” campaign against pro-treaty forces, without ever fully explaining
their opposition to the treaty (pp. 146, 147). Labor and women’s groups were late recruits to the Irish

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nationalist cause and yet anti-treaty sentiment within these circles ran high. Their critiques of the
treaty and Irish Free State, far from parroting that of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Éamon de
Valera’s supporters in groups like the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic,
were in many ways unique and insightful. In particular, women and labor opponents of the treaty
arguably proved correct in charging that Dominion status would enable Britain to impose a neo-
imperialist economic relationship on Ireland that impeded Irish economic development, as would
partition and the separation of Northern Ireland from the Irish Free State. They also correctly
insisted that the forms of government that were adopted by the Irish Free State under British
supervision were far less democratic than the Sinn Féin government that emerged during the
revolution and would undermine gains achieved for women and labor during the revolutionary
period.[4]

These criticisms aside, Carroll’s account successfully demonstrates the importance of including the
Irish Revolution in assessments of US responses to foreign rebellions during the World War I era.
Recent trends in diplomatic history have led to a relative neglect of interest group lobbying by
diaspora communities. On the one hand, historians of US foreign relations have recently devoted
significant attention to exploring the transnational flow of US ideas and influence across national
borders by more systemically including foreign archives in their studies. Erez Manela, for example,
has successfully tracked the flow of Wilsonian ideas and influence to Asia and the Middle East during
the World War I period. But, too often, these studies have focused primarily on the flow of ideas from
West to East while failing to consider the reverse currents from East to West or from South to North.
The “new cultural turn” in the field, meanwhile, has encouraged historians to focus on the ways in
which US policymakers and propaganda agencies, such as the World War I-era Committee on Public
Information, used American icons and myths to create a “national identity” for Americans that
encouraged “spontaneous consent” for its foreign policies.[5] Yet as Carroll so ably demonstrates, the
United States was still a multicultural nation of immigrants in the World War I era and its citizens
were regularly exposed to a wide variety of perspectives on international affairs by transnational
lecturers as well as immigrant leaders, the immigrant press, and Progressive political leaders with
competing agendas. Against this backdrop, pluralist forms of interest group lobbying and influence
peddling remained strong and served as an important counterhegemonic check on those who sought
to create “100 percent Americanism” in support of US foreign policy. In this respect, it might be
useful for foreign relations historians to refocus some attention on the US. domestic scene in order to
discover new forms of transnational agency and influence such as those highlighted in Carroll’s book.

Elizabeth McKillen is Bird and Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine. Her most recent
book is Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2013). She is currently at work on a book entitled Contesting Colonized
Lives: Women of the Transatlantic Irish Left and the Irish Revolution.

Notes

[1]. For examples of studies on US foreign policy toward the Irish issue, see Charles Tansill, America
and the Fight for Irish Freedom, 1866-1922 (New York: Devlin-Adair, 1957); Alan J. Ward, Ireland and
Anglo-American Relations,1899-1921 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); and Robert Schmul,
Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
For examples of textbook and synthetic treatment of the Wilson administration, see Thomas Paterson,

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American Foreign Relations: A History, vol. 1, 8th ed. (New York: Cengage Learning, 2015); and
Walter Hixson, The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). On Wilsonianism in Asia, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian
Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007).

[2]. See especially Joanne Mooney Eichacker, Irish Republican Women in America: Lecture Tours,
1915-1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003); Tara McCarthy, Respectability and Reform: Irish
American Women’s Activism, 1880-1920, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018) ); Elizabeth
McKillen, “Reverse Currents: Irish Feminist and Nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and U.S. Anti-
imperialism, 1916-1924,” Éire-Ireland 53: 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 148-185 and relevant articles in
Miriam Nyhan Grey ed., Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising (Dublin: University
College Dublin Press, 2016); Catherine M. Burns, “Kathleen O’Brennan and American Identity in the
Transatlantic Irish Republican Movement,” in The Irish in the Atlantic World, ed. David T. Gleason
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012): 176-94.

[3]. Elizabeth McKillen, “The Irish Sinn Féin Movement and Radical Labor and Feminist Dissent in
America: 1916-1921,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16, no. 3 (September 2019): 11-37,
and “Ethnicity, Class, and Wilsonian Internationalism Reconsidered: The Mexican-American and Irish-
American Immigrant Left and U.S. Foreign Relations: 1914-1922,” Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001):
553-87; Michael Chapman, “How to Smash the British Empire,” Eire-Ireland 43 (Fall/Winter 2008):
217-52; Joe Doyle, “Striking for Ireland on the New York Docks,” in The New York Irish, ed. Timothy
Meagher and Ronald Bayor (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 327-53; David
Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798-1999 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016); James Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City
(New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

[4]. McKillen, “Reverse Currents,” 176-82. See also Irish feminist and nationalist Hanna Sheehy
Skeffington’s hard-hitting articles in the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator throughout
the 1920s, and her address before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in
Dublin in 1926 in Margert Ward, ed., Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Suffragette and Sinn Féiner: Her
Memoirs and Political Writings (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2017), 217-19. See also
Jason Knirck, Women of the Dáil: Gender, Republicanism, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (Dublin: Irish
Academic Press, 2006).

[5]. Manela, Wilsonian Moment; Hixson, Myth of American Diplomacy, 1-2, 127-31.

Citation: Elizabeth McKillen. Review of Carroll, Francis M., America and the Making of an
Independent Ireland. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. August, 2021. URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56518

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.

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